Silhouette: device profiles API

Luke Wroblewski talks about RESS, responsive design + server-side components. Its a hybrid approach that combines responsive design with server-side software that tweaks the the rendered HTML for groups of device capabilities.

The core of this concept requires the server-side components to sort devices based on their capabilities into a small number of device "profiles". Drupal currently caches the HTML for all anonymous users. We need to expand Drupal's capabilities to cache the HTML response of each device group. (The higher the number of device profiles, the more likely an expensive cache-miss would occur, so you'd want to limit the number of device profiles.)

- Drupal anonymous cacheing per device profile
- API to turn device capability detection into device profile
- Basic device capability detection
- API to get breakpoints from themes
- UI for device group configuration

One possible use for this device profiles API would be to build a "responsive images" module on top of this module. Adaptive or responsive designs require images that grow or shrink depending on the size of the user’s browser. The web industry is still discovering best practices for markup and CSS implementations.

Related articles:

• RESS — Luke Wroblewski
• Responsive Designs — Ethan Marcotte
• Adaptive Designs (and CSS Media Query for Mobile is Fool’s Gold)
• Mobile First — Luke Wroblewski / One Web — Jeremy Keith
• Responsive IMGs — Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 — Future of the IMG Tag — Jason Grigsby
• What responsive IMG technique should we teach in our book? — Jason Grigsby
• Choosing between semantic markup and working code — Jason Grigsby
• Device detection as the future friendly IMG option — Jason Grigsby
• Clarification on device detection — Jason Grigsby
• Preferred solutions for responsive images — Jason Grigsby